The sun was out, the Twins were fighting for first place and Mona Mitchell came out of the gift shop at Target Field with a new team T-shirt. She had already bought tickets for two upcoming games, and she was flirting with buying more.
"I love it when you go to a game that matters," she said. It has been four years since the Twins have played games that mattered, and the team's unexpected surge to the top of the American League Central Division standings has rekindled baseball interest in the Twin Cities.
Fox Sports North reports that viewership was up 29 percent from April to May, and Mike Dimond, the cable outlet's general manager, was already talking about the possibility of having the season on the line in the final weekend with the defending American League champion Kansas City Royals at Target Field.
"We're not going to get ahead of ourselves," he added, however. Then again ...
Kevin Tapani, the former Twins pitcher, is among many who like what they see in everything from Paul Molitor, the new manager, to Trevor Plouffe and Brian Dozier, the slick-fielding infielders who are leading the team in home runs. "They're very fundamentally sound," said Tapani, now a high school baseball coach at Providence Academy in Plymouth. "They run balls out. They do a lot of things right. [The] pitching is solid. They're in every game."
Alan Petri of Apple Valley said the turnaround has come just in time. "If I were the Pohlad [family, the team's owners], I'd be a little nervous if this season hadn't happened," he said as he waited at Target Field for a friend to buy tickets. Target Field is five years old, explained Petri, and counting on fans to go to a game simply to see the stadium may not work anymore.
"Now — it's just a stadium," he said. "You need something to put in it that draws people. Stadium won't do it by" itself.
Downward curve
The numbers support that view. After four consecutive 90-plus loss seasons, season-ticket holders had dropped from 17,500 last year to just 13,500 this year. For many fans, having the Twins play host to baseball's All-Star Game was last season's highlight — as opposed to actually watching the team stagger to another last-place finish, 20 games behind the division-winning Detroit Tigers.